summary: New research reveals a unique aspect of human memory. That is, after experiencing negative emotions, our ability to recall events becomes more acute.
Researchers conducted an experiment in which participants viewed images that evoked both negative and neutral emotional responses. They found that memories after a negative experience are recalled more accurately than memories from before.
This insight is critical to understanding eyewitness testimony, treating PTSD, and addressing memory decline in diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Important facts:
- Negative events lead to improved recall of subsequent neutral events, but not of preceding events.
- This memory pattern influences eyewitness testimony, suggesting that people recall events more vividly after a traumatic event.
- The findings could help develop cognitive treatments for PTSD and combat memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease.
sauce: beckman institute
Midway through a true crime podcast, a morning commuter narrowly avoids a collision by jerking the steering wheel. When discussing the podcast with co-workers later in the day, Driver can easily recall details from the second half of the episode, but only has a vague memory of how it started.
A new study by psychologists at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology suggests that we remember the moments immediately following a distressing episode more vividly than the moments leading up to the episode.
Uncovering the relationship between trauma and memory can improve methods for evaluating eyewitness testimony, inform treatments for PTSD, and help clinicians combat memory decline in brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
This research will be published in the journal Cognition and emotion.
“This is a clear finding and opens up a whole new dimension in understanding how emotions influence memory,” said lead author Paul Bogdan, a Ph.D. His work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign formed the basis for this study.
Bogdan’s research was conducted within the Dorkos Laboratory, directed by psychology professors Florin Dorkos and Sanda Dorkos. For more than 15 years, the Dorcozes have studied the relationship between mental health and memory, particularly unwanted memories that invade daily life, worsen mental health, and exacerbate anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
The result of their research is an emotional safety system created with cognitive therapy that protects emotional safety and maintains focus in the face of troubling memories.
Researchers say traumatic memories are difficult to study because our brains tend to auto-edit negative experiences. Big ideas take precedence over details, peripheral functions cede to central functions, and specific moments are removed from the context of where, when, and “what else could have been,” says Florin. Dorcos said.
So far, there is little evidence explaining when and how negative emotions affect our ability to place a sequence of memories along a timeline.
“Suppose your partner unexpectedly insults you during a neutral discussion. Later, when you try to make sense of the encounter, you remember more accurately what happened before and after the insult.” ” Bogdan said. “Existing research does not provide a clear answer.”
But Bogdan’s new study might. His team organized two identical experiments on him. One is his initial study with 72 participants to confirm the procedure and predictions, and the other is his replication study with 150 participants to confirm the results.
First, participants viewed a series of images that simulated a series of memories. Half of the images evoked a negative emotional response, and the remaining images were emotionally neutral.
To contextualize the images and make them more memorable, participants were asked to personally imagine themselves traveling between the locations depicted in the photos and create a creative story that connects them. It was done. This “facilitated the sense that pairs of images in the series were meaningfully related,” the researchers wrote.
After 1 hour, participants viewed pairs of images from the series. For each pair, we asked whether the second photo was taken immediately before or after the first. (We were also given a “neither” option, allowing us to indicate if we didn’t remember the order.)
The results were consistent in both studies. The participant’s ability to accurately place her second image improved when the negative memory occurred before the neutral memory on the timeline. If participants were shown a negative image first, they were better able to recall the neutral images that followed. Conversely, if participants are shown neutral images first, they are able to more consistently place previously presented negative images.
In other words, memories flow from negative to neutral.
“Our results therefore suggest that when you are insulted during a conversation, it is better to remember what was said immediately after, rather than what was said immediately before,” Bogdan said.
This is counterintuitive, the researchers say.
“One might imagine that humans evolved to have positive memories for events that led to negative events,” Bogdan says. “If you were bitten by a snake, what kind of reckless thing did you do before it happened?”
One explanation is that a spike in negative emotion (e.g., when you get bitten by a snake) causes a sudden burst of concentration and attention, making you take thorough notes about what happens next and save it for future use. It tells the brain to store them for the purpose of saving them.
But Prelude to Trauma features a far less diligent note-taker. This casts a suspicious eye on scenarios such as eyewitness testimony, where the details of the situation are most important.
“We know that people are more likely to miss the details that caused something negative to happen, so their recollection of what happened afterwards is better for statements related to the event that led to the crime. We can be more cautious in comparison because we know it’s going to be clearer,” Florin Dorcos said.
These results are important not only in courtrooms but also in clinical settings, as they help elucidate the mechanisms behind PTSD, in which objectively neutral activities can unconsciously trigger negative emotions. Helpful.
“For example, a military veteran hears a loud noise and assumes that his building will soon be destroyed by an explosion,” says Florin Dorcos.
“This happens because there is a disconnect between the memory of a traumatic experience and its original context: when, where, and what broke.”
Therefore, to regain control of traumatic memories, we need to reconnect them to their context, their original place and time. The researchers hope to incorporate this strategy into cognitive therapy for her PTSD patients.
In addition to calming the maelstrom of negative memories, therapy can also involve harnessing positive emotions to rebuild stronger, more vivid memories for those in need, Sanda Dorcos says. It is said that there is a sex.
“As people get older, memory problems, especially conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, become more severe,” she says. “Memory for context is most impaired. Once we know exactly what’s going on, we can develop future strategies to better encode information that will help us help others in that situation.” can do.”
About this PTSD and memory research news
author: Jenna Kurzweil
sauce: beckman institute
contact: Jenna Kurzweil – Beckman Institute
image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Open access.
“Emotional dissociation in temporal association: Opposing effects of arousal on memory of details about unpleasant events.Written by Paul Bogdan et al. cognition and emotion
abstract
Emotional dissociation in temporal association: Opposing effects of arousal on memory of details about unpleasant events.
Although research targeting the influence of emotion on relational episodic memory has mainly focused on spatial aspects, less is known about the influence of emotion on memory regarding the temporal association of events. In this study, we investigated this topic. Participants viewed a series of interspersed negative and neutral images with instructions to create a story that connected the successive images.
Participants then completed an unannounced memory test. This test measured the temporal association between pairs of consecutive pictures, one of which was negative and the other neutral. The analysis focused on how the order of negative and neutral images during encoding affected retrieval accuracy.
Convergent results from discovery studies (N= 72) and a preregistered replication study (N= 150) revealed a “positive” effect of emotion on temporal memory encoding. Participants encoded the association between a negative stimulus and a subsequent neutral stimulus more strongly than the association between a negative stimulus and a preceding neutral stimulus.
This finding may reflect a new trade-off regarding the influence of emotion on memory and is relevant to understanding affective disorders, as key clinical symptoms can be conceptualized as maladaptive memory retrieval of temporal detail. are doing.